Garrett McMartin: Why an Indigenous Entrepreneur Chose to Build a Child Welfare Standard

Garrett McMartin is a Semiahmoo First Nation member, entrepreneur, and director of KFT-Families Society. He joined the IFISC board because the accountability tools that build trustworthy markets have always been missing from Indigenous child welfare, and he intends to change that.

Garrett McMartin is not a child welfare professional. He is an entrepreneur.

He is a member of the Semiahmoo First Nation and the founder of several consumer brands. He joined the board of KFT-Families Society because he saw the same problem in child welfare that he had seen in every market without a standard: no way for families to evaluate who had earned the right to serve them.

“A certification changes the market,” McMartin has said. “When a provider is certified, families have ground to stand on. Without it, there is no floor.”

What an entrepreneur brings to a child welfare board

McMartin’s background is in brand building and consumer trust. He has spent years working on how people evaluate quality in the absence of transparent standards.

Child welfare, he argues, has the same problem. Families entering the system have no public rating to consult. No certification to verify. No market signal that distinguishes a provider who has done the cultural work from one who has not.

His role at KFT is to ensure IFISC is designed not only to hold providers accountable internally, but to function as a signal that courts, governments, and families can act on.

Why Indigenous entrepreneurship and child welfare intersect

McMartin sees a direct line between economic sovereignty and family sovereignty.

Indigenous entrepreneurs in Canada have long operated without the infrastructure that makes markets function: legal title, credit access, recognized standards. The same structural absence appears in child welfare. Communities with jurisdiction under Bill C-92 do not have a national certification standard that makes that jurisdiction operational at the provider level.

IFISC is that standard. McMartin’s presence on the board reflects a belief that building it requires people who understand how accountability frameworks function in practice, not only in legislation.

What his involvement signals about how IFISC was built

The KFT board is six directors. Five are Indigenous. Lori Damon, co-founder and director, has been working with families in the child welfare system since 1987. Stuart Cadwallader has authored more than 3,400 Gladue reports and designed British Columbia’s original Gladue report template. Three Elders, Lorelei Hawkins, Rusty Edmonds, and Tom Oleman, guide the organization’s work.

McMartin’s seat brings a different set of tools. His focus is on ensuring IFISC functions as a certifiable, market-legible standard that governments can require in procurement, funders can evaluate in due diligence, and families can trust when a removal decision arrives.

He describes his role as building the accountability layer that legislation left out.

That layer, applied to a system affecting the lives of 53.8% of children in Canadian foster care, is not a business problem. It is a sovereignty problem. And it requires exactly the kind of structural thinking that building accountable markets demands.

If you are an Indigenous family navigating child welfare in BC and need peer support, contact KFT-Families Society at [email protected], call Lori at 604-512-3266, or visit keeping-families-together.com. IFISC operates weekly peer support circles, connects families with culturally grounded resources, and provides guidance to parents at every stage of the child welfare process — at no cost.